Movies

A pleasure for all the seasons of life

*** 1/2 RATING

It takes intestinal fortitude to grow old. No choice, you say? There's always a choice. Whether to grow old as a career, making a full-time job out of prescriptions, insurance, shortcomings and complaints.

Or whether to keep working, continue shuffling forward, hitting the pub with friends and leering at the opposite sex.

Maurice (Peter O'Toole) and his friends in "Venus" choose the latter path - when permitted by remission of bodily aches and spells of forgetfulness. They dump pill bottles out on the bar and trade for the best side-effects. They flirt with waitresses, and later, regrettably, with the 19-year-old nieces of their best friends.

And they take work, any work, to get out of the house, even if it means an acting gig as the very corpse they hope to avoid becoming anytime soon.

"Venus" boasts the courage of its characters, and the courage of its actors. O'Toole is 74, and in recent public appearances has shown more of his age than our memories of an elegant ladies' man would care to reconcile. For him, "Venus" and his role as a dying, almost-useless actor is not so far from the truth that he can be smug about it.

"Venus" succeeds because there is no hint of smugness in sight. We are who we are, the movie argues, and we are who we turn into when age changes everything. No sense running. Can't run anyway, not with this bad hip.

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Might as well sit here, have another smoke and a packet of crisps, and chat up the girls.

As "Venus" opens, Maurice and Ian (Leslie Phillips) seem destined for declining years of teasing male friendship and trading supportive visits to local hospitals. Much has been made of Maurice's lecherous eye for women young enough to be his granddaughter, but the most interesting parts of "Venus" are about men growing old together.

Ex-wife Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave) still adores Maurice (Peter O Toole),
though she hasn t forgotten he abandoned her with three kids under the
age of 6, in "Venus." (Miramax Pictures)

Maurice and Ian might need walkers and an oxygen tank to go pub-crawling, but in them you see all the easy joys of male friendship: the arguments, the quick verbal jabs, the taking of offense, the immediate forgiveness.

But a stranger coming into town is one of the basic movie plots, and "Venus" rides on that formula. Ian's niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) arrives, ostensibly to take care of her uncle, more likely in flight from a bad reputation in her hometown. She lies around watching telly, and drinking the dregs of others' Guinness cans.

When she declares to Maurice that she plans a career in modeling, Maurice eyes her soft figure and nacho-cheese-stained fingers, and asks, not unkindly, "Do you have a fallback position?"

Though Maurice is growing impotent from onrushing prostate problems, he seeks one last sexual charge from his new Venus, even if only to nuzzle her bare neck. Jessie, meanwhile, could use Maurice's spending money, and she may warm up to his friendship. She trades brief flashes of skin or close-up whiffs of her teenage perfume for nights on the town or outings to see a play. ("Can't I go see 'Lion King?"' Jessie whines.)

When a friend suspects, again not unkindly, that Maurice's interest in Jessie is a few notes off paternal, he inquires of Maurice, "What do you do to her, at your age?"

"It's a very difficult thing," Maurice says, "but I'm nice to her."

There are hints of Maurice's past, enough to know he usually put himself first. His ex-wife (Vanessa Redgrave) still adores him, though she hasn't forgotten he abandoned her with three kids under the age of 6. When he muses to another friend that at the end of his life, he knows "nothing" about himself, his exasperated friend replies, "But you've been loved, Maurice. You've been adored."

So has O'Toole, and for good reason. As an actor, and as a character, he knows he is the center of attention.

And these days, he knows he won't be for much longer.

For everyone on either side of the camera, the pleasure is all the sweeter in the meantime.

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